Back to School

Even though it's still 85 degrees outside, summer is officially over for me. Classes started last week and I am already feeling the squeeze of not having enough hours in the day to get everything done. Perhaps having such a relaxing summer was not actually in my best interest, because it has made it that much harder to get back into the swing of things. I guess I'll just have to suck it up and be thankful that I even got into grad school in the first place or else I would have spent my summer under a fluorescent light working for a modern day slave-driver :)

Over my final 2 weeks of "freedom" I finally got around to canning a batch of salsa (with the generous help of my friend and school-mate Christina). My cayenne peppers and Roma tomatoes were slow to ripen this year, probably because we were able to supply them with water on a regular basis this year with the irrigation system, so I wasn't able to make the salsa until much later in the season as compared to last year. I also canned some pepper jelly, but not without a major kitchen catastrophe in the midst of the whole process. I didn't turn the heat down fast enough after bringing the jelly mixture to a boil and ended up with a boil over of molten sugar/pepper lava all over the stove. This quickly turned into black sugar char that is now a permanent feature of my stovetop, fan-friggin-tastic! Oh well, I've been telling Shawn we need a gas stove anyway, I hate those stupid electric ranges (although that particular disaster could have turned into a serious fire had there been flame involved). Here's a shot of my lovely peppers before they got turned into jelly:
As for more recent news, over the past two days we have had very intense rain and there has been significant flooding in our area. Since we live alongside the Haw River, I was curious to see how high it was after the rains had stopped. Shawn and I rode down to the river on the 4-wheeler last night and we were in awe of what we saw:

This field is normally used to grow oats or corn, but luckily it had already been harvested or there would have been a complete loss. And as you can see, our garden rain gauge runneth over (I guess we won't need to water for awhile!) Also, our corn has tasseled out, so hopefully we'll have about 600 ears of fresh silver queen corn in a few weeks!